Seems like some good changes. The goal of these deep learning algorithms playing games to me has always seemed like it should be one of discovering new human usable strategies that humans may have overlooked. I.e. teaching a machine to think like a human but better. Not restricting the computer like a human just means they win in computer ways, which doesn't really teach anyone anything. Any one who has played starcraft realizes that being able to perfectly control unit movement would be a huge advantage.

Questions about the restrictions:Can the AI move the units via the minimap or does it have to actually move the camera? Does it functionally matter for the AI?When moving the camera, does it 'scroll' or does it click around on the minimap to move around, e.g. jump instantly to a new location?Regarding the cap on APM, is there any word on what the cap is? 350? 400?

I watched the AlphaStar vs pro games with starcraft 2. It was absolute insanity.AlphaStar could micro stalkers to individually blink away when their health or shields were low with crazy efficency, and did a few other things that were notable.

The one and only time I saw that it got caught in a typical AI loop/mistake was when Protoss used an observer *invisible* to watch AlphaStar's deathball, and do, runs on the main base production causing it to go back and fourth without actually engaging the harassment group or counter attacking.

I would like to see how it plays survival games like Subnautica and Breathedge once trained.

[quote="NowickiAlphaStar could micro stalkers to individually blink away when their health or shields were low with crazy efficency, and did a few other things that were notable.[/quote]

And that's the entire reason it could roflestomp human players. It's ability to micro manage units with pinpoint accuracy getting spikes of over 60Actions per secomd while it was able to average an APM considered human.

Hobble it's apm to aps and a hard "don't ever exceed this." The you might see some strategy instead of "amazing micro skills".

[quote="NowickiAlphaStar could micro stalkers to individually blink away when their health or shields were low with crazy efficency, and did a few other things that were notable.

And that's the entire reason it could roflestomp human players. It's ability to micro manage units with pinpoint accuracy getting spikes of over 60Actions per secomd while it was able to average an APM considered human.

Hobble it's apm to aps and a hard "don't ever exceed this." The you might see some strategy instead of "amazing micro skills".[/quote]

This is one of those cases where the more you beat AlphaStar, the stronger and more capable it gets. Beating it only makes it stronger.

I look forward to the results

Actually this sounds like the AI people finally realized that having the "ai" cheat by moving faster gave a mixed measure learning.

Consider it like this the germans used blitzkrieg to attack, destory and move forward quickly. however that didnt' give them staying power. The AI was shown to have a weakness when it could only see the same maps as humans could. could only use input speeds at Keyboard rates. etc.

This sounds like they are trying to create an AI that can actually learn and play at human speeds. The learning will take longer, but it might show actual strategy.

Questions about the restrictions:Can the AI move the units via the minimap or does it have to actually move the camera? Does it functionally matter for the AI?When moving the camera, does it 'scroll' or does it click around on the minimap to move around, e.g. jump instantly to a new location?Regarding the cap on APM, is there any word on what the cap is? 350? 400?

This AI is fascinating to me.

That what I wonder about. If the AI do the scrolling and SCAN the screen for 5 sec to get an idea, then it is far. I wonder if the AI scroll and took a snapshot of the screen then send to background process at the same time continuing scrolling and snapshot every screen, that would not be reasonable and fair to compete the Pros.

Also I wonder if they include margin of errors to be on the equal footing with the Pros.

Seems like some good changes. The goal of these deep learning algorithms playing games to me has always seemed like it should be one of discovering new human usable strategies that humans may have overlooked.

No, that’s not the goal. The goal of AI is to serve humanity and increase our quality of life before eventually continuing our search for knowledge after our extinction. Restricting it to human useable strategies just limits it’s usefulness and creativity. Should a self-driving car have its reaction times and APM limited? Should a surgery bot be limited to an optical camera? Of course not.

Now it may be that an unshackled AI could never learn to plan and strategize from Starcraft because the game would come down to executing one Uber-strategy at extreme precision and that only one race would be viable. Fine, prove it first then shackle the AI if necessary.

Well, the AI doesn't care about developing some grand and novel strategy. It's the humans (researchers and commentators) that want to see some super general emerge, able to win by outthinking all its opponents.

The AI just cares about win rates, and it turns out superhuman micro is really good. The merely human who can't physically perform like that don't particularly like this fact, and it ruins some romantic notion that being able to "outplay" your opponent is the pinnacle of strategy, but it's true.

When all you care about is winning, superhuman blink stalker micro is a winning strategy.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't know either way. The people who play it all the time might as well be machines as far as I am concerned. I tried to play it competitively back in the day (way back), but there is just no competing against many of the remaining players, especially from Asia.

AlphaStar could micro stalkers to individually blink away when their health or shields were low with crazy efficency, and did a few other things that were notable.

And that's the entire reason it could roflestomp human players. It's ability to micro manage units with pinpoint accuracy getting spikes of over 60Actions per secomd while it was able to average an APM considered human.

Hobble it's apm to aps and a hard "don't ever exceed this." The you might see some strategy instead of "amazing micro skills".

that's a mischaracterization. While in the demonstration games there were instances of superhuman micro, and the stalker micro in one of the games was extremely notable, there was a 5s apm limit, and afaict in practice despite how flash some of those apm bursts were, they didn't decide the entire five game match. they probably almost certainly decided that particular stalker match since it basically made the stalker ball invulnerable, but to characterize deepmind as purely a tactical/APM machine is wrong.

Wouldn't also be interesting if the AI sensed it's imposed limitations? That could precipitate not only new strategies, but also a sense of "bending the Matrix" ie. exposing the artificiality of the game environment. Imagine as it finds ways that the rules could be bent or even broken it realizes that it is just playing a game.

I'd like to see how it compares when limited to human-like abilities. Mainly, I'd like to see actions per minute limited and for it to have the latency humans have when selecting units or groups of units. Then we'd see if it has a superior strategy or just doing what we do but a lot faster.

Do you think humanity will live forever? I’ve got news for you— eternal life is impossible in an expanding universe. It’s ok for change to occur. If that means artificial life will supplement and eventually supersede biological life, that’s ok. The universe is always in change.

[quote="NowickiAlphaStar could micro stalkers to individually blink away when their health or shields were low with crazy efficency, and did a few other things that were notable.

And that's the entire reason it could roflestomp human players. It's ability to micro manage units with pinpoint accuracy getting spikes of over 60Actions per secomd while it was able to average an APM considered human.

Hobble it's apm to aps and a hard "don't ever exceed this." The you might see some strategy instead of "amazing micro skills".

Actually... They already did hobble its apm. Quite severely.[/quote]

It still allowed super human APM bursts. Which made it's strategy of micromanaging a group of glass cannons effectively invulnerable.

Had they put a hard limit that targeted the bursts of APM it would have made a definate difference in how the blob performed. Would it have still been effective? Yes, the AI could concentrate on which unit it should try to remove from the front much better than a human player. Would the blob be an unstoppable blender of death? Not so much as it was before.

[quote="NowickiAlphaStar could micro stalkers to individually blink away when their health or shields were low with crazy efficency, and did a few other things that were notable.

And that's the entire reason it could roflestomp human players. It's ability to micro manage units with pinpoint accuracy getting spikes of over 60Actions per secomd while it was able to average an APM considered human.

Hobble it's apm to aps and a hard "don't ever exceed this." The you might see some strategy instead of "amazing micro skills".

Actually... They already did hobble its apm. Quite severely.

It still allowed super human APM bursts. Which made it's strategy of micromanaging a group of glass cannons effectively invulnerable.[/quote]Actually that strategy was probably easy to beat but they never let the human play the same AI twice. We’ll never know for sure but it may have been far weaker than it seemed.

Do you think humanity will live forever? I’ve got news for you— eternal life is impossible in an expanding universe. It’s ok for change to occur. If that means artificial life will supplement and eventually supersede biological life, that’s ok. The universe is always in change.

But not if artificial life eliminates biological life, and then fails to adapt and grow to changes in the same way that biological life has done. Ultimately that could result in a dead-end that fails completely.

Do you think humanity will live forever? I’ve got news for you— eternal life is impossible in an expanding universe. It’s ok for change to occur. If that means artificial life will supplement and eventually supersede biological life, that’s ok. The universe is always in change.

You can bow to the synthetic overlords all you want collaborator, but the rest of us will be fighting in the resistance against the machines.

Do you think humanity will live forever? I’ve got news for you— eternal life is impossible in an expanding universe. It’s ok for change to occur. If that means artificial life will supplement and eventually supersede biological life, that’s ok. The universe is always in change.

But not if artificial life eliminates biological life, and then fails to adapt and grow to changes in the same way that biological life has done. Ultimately that could result in a dead-end that fails completely.

Then life arises on another planet and the cycle begins anew. Infinite permutations.

Remember when they had those AI talk to each other and they came up with their own jibberish language as a result? I would be curious to see them feed the 1v1 data and end each day with a deepmind vs. deepmind mirror match with unshackled APM just to see what novel things it did.

Well, the AI doesn't care about developing some grand and novel strategy. It's the humans (researchers and commentators) that want to see some super general emerge, able to win by outthinking all its opponents.

The AI just cares about win rates, and it turns out superhuman micro is really good. The merely human who can't physically perform like that don't particularly like this fact, and it ruins some romantic notion that being able to "outplay" your opponent is the pinnacle of strategy, but it's true.

When all you care about is winning, superhuman blink stalker micro is a winning strategy.

people are fixating on blink stalker micro, but it was only one out of five games in the final demonstration match, (one out of ten if you include the earlier match).

people fixating on one flashy moment is a good illustration why one shouldn't rely on anecdote and memory for data.

Well, the AI doesn't care about developing some grand and novel strategy. It's the humans (researchers and commentators) that want to see some super general emerge, able to win by outthinking all its opponents.

The AI just cares about win rates, and it turns out superhuman micro is really good. The merely human who can't physically perform like that don't particularly like this fact, and it ruins some romantic notion that being able to "outplay" your opponent is the pinnacle of strategy, but it's true.

When all you care about is winning, superhuman blink stalker micro is a winning strategy.

Yeah, but if you want it to come up with other results (like human reproducible) you have to de-incentivate the superhuman micro, which sounds like what they did. Of course, superhuman interaction is a winning strategy against humans, but they didn't need AlphaZero for that, you just have to look at the ton of bots at RTS, MOBAS or FPS.

It sounds like the AI used to have a complete view of the map (likely still restricted by the fog of war), but now it has a camera to manage just like a player. However, it sounds like the AI is allowed to process whatever is visible within this camera view, and I wonder if that's still too much? I don't consider myself to be an expert on StarCraft, but even though we may also be capable of seeing an entire camera view, it's my understanding that we tend to tunnel vision a bit at times. For example, if a player is moving the camera in a direction, they would tend to focus more on the direction to which they're moving. This is part of why it's possible for an enemy unit to sometimes briefly appear at the edge of a player's camera and never get noticed. However, it sounds like the AI would notice this unit.

I guess it really comes down to intended purpose. Is this meant to be a human-like AI that can take on high-level StarCraft players, or an AI that has some human-like restrictions to help level the playing field, but in the end, it's still an AI capable of superhuman feats.

Well, the AI doesn't care about developing some grand and novel strategy. It's the humans (researchers and commentators) that want to see some super general emerge, able to win by outthinking all its opponents.

The AI just cares about win rates, and it turns out superhuman micro is really good. The merely human who can't physically perform like that don't particularly like this fact, and it ruins some romantic notion that being able to "outplay" your opponent is the pinnacle of strategy, but it's true.

When all you care about is winning, superhuman blink stalker micro is a winning strategy.

people are fixating on blink stalker micro, but it was only one out of five games in the final demonstration match, (one out of ten if you include the earlier match).

people fixating on one flashy moment is a good illustration why one shouldn't rely on anecdote and memory for data.

It was more than the blinks. Sometimes it felt like Mana was playing against three opponents. The machine could micromanage two mid map battles and a raid simultaneously, cause it didn't have to visually switch from one to another. When they restricted that (somewhat ad hoc it seems), AlphaStar lost.

If the end goal is to teach AlphaStar strategy rather than win tournaments, they got to tune it down to human standards. In the long term, it will make no difference. It will develop novel strategies, immunize itself from tactical mistakes and eventually it will surpass humans.

Last, there are a couple of fun experiments I 'd like to see.1. Alphastar (tuned down) playing Zerg against Serral2. AlphaStar (unrestricted) vs Stats+Maru

Well, the AI doesn't care about developing some grand and novel strategy. It's the humans (researchers and commentators) that want to see some super general emerge, able to win by outthinking all its opponents.

The AI just cares about win rates, and it turns out superhuman micro is really good. The merely human who can't physically perform like that don't particularly like this fact, and it ruins some romantic notion that being able to "outplay" your opponent is the pinnacle of strategy, but it's true.

When all you care about is winning, superhuman blink stalker micro is a winning strategy.

The whole point of this update is that AlphaStar's ability to do that has been severely restricted. Not eliminated entirely, but enough that superhuman blink stalker micro and similar tactics aren't enough to win anymore.

In this version, at least in theory, AlphaStar has to beat the human at the macro as well as the micro.